2009 Founders’ Letter

Introduction

Sergey and I got over our fear of failure and
finally founded Google in 1998. If we had known
then what Google would become in 2009, we would
have been totally flabbergasted. The scale and
scope of our services, and the opportunities they
offer users, are phenomenal, and we are very lucky
to be a part of this business. Rather than try to
run through an exhaustive list of everything we
have done this year, I’m going to focus on a couple
of issues—access to information and a new model of
computing— that are of particular interest to me,
and on which I have unique perspective.

I was lucky enough to grow up with computers, and
so from an early age I learned that there’s always
more potential at hand with technology, especially
as I struggled to read programs off kludgey
cassette tapes. While I’m astounded at the pace and
progress we have made on many areas of the Internet
and computing, I am also amazed how slow progress
has been in other equally promising areas. Often
what is required to make progress in technology is
focus. For example, there is a hundred times more
activity in clean energy today than there was just
a few years ago simply because more people are now
focused on this issue. What really motivates me is
this dichotomy of slow progress in some areas and
fast progress in others. This is a tremendous
social and business opportunity. Who would have
thought in 1998 that anyone could get for free a
highresolution picture of their house from above,
and even from the street? That is Google Earth,
Maps, and Street View. Was it a foregone conclusion
that we would have these kind of products now? No,
it was not. This progress happened because focused
teams of people made those ideas a reality. We
could just as easily have hit 2010 and not have had
these services available on the Internet at all.

Finding important technological areas where
progress is currently slow, but could be made fast,
is what Google is all about.

I’m excited about our opportunities to make a big
difference in people’s lives through technology. We
can build these great new products into great new
businesses too. Google Translate is a recent
example. You can now translate pretty well and
instantly between any of 54 languages—that is about
2550 language pairs—and search the web and read
results in languages you don’t speak! We even have
Google Translate for your Android phone—so you
speak in English and it translates into German out
loud! This is all using software for speech
recognition and translation that we have developed
at Google. Users around the world have noticed the
speed and quality of our translations, which is why
Google Translate is growing like wildfire. We’re
putting this technology into YouTube too, so you
can watch videos even if you don’t speak the same
language, or have difficulty hearing—automatically.
Imagine anyone in the world being able to watch and
understand any video no matter the language.
YouTube is an extraordinary platform, and for me is
like another kind of tube that I use every day,
toothpaste. Apparently I am not alone: we have over
1,000,000,000 daily views on YouTube. YouTube has
new features like full high-definition content at
1080p and tools to help you share videos with your
friends. Over the last year, YouTube has also been
making a lot more money for us and our partners,
with content partner ad revenue more than tripling
in 2009.

Recently we announced a new project to build 1
gigabit per second fiber-to-the-home broadband
networks for one or more U.S. cities and towns
between 50,000 and 500,000 people. This access is
about 100x faster than most people have today. We
asked communities to come back with ideas, and one
mayor had an unusual response:

“I, William W. Bunten, mayor of the city of Topeka,
Kansas, urge the citizens of Topeka to recognize
and support the continuing efforts to bring
Google’s ‘Fiber for Communities’ experiment to our
city, and do hereby proclaim that for the month of
March 2010, the city of Topeka will be known as
Google, Kansas.”

From such quirky tributes and detailed
applications, we have seen a lot of interest in
Google Fiber. Our goal with this project is to show
what’s possible by driving technological
development of home Internet connections at a
faster rate. If we succeed, it will benefit users
everywhere, as well as our own services, which can
debut amazing new capabilities using higher speed
connections.

Access to Information

Search and Ads

Roughly 70% of our resources are allocated to core
search and advertising, and we have been doing a
tremendous amount of work on both. Creating the
perfect search engine remains our ultimate goal,
but we’re still a long way from doing that, which
is why we are not resting on our laurels. I have
really enjoyed our new “show options” link that
appears at the top of the results. If you click
this you get a whole bunch of options, including
time, geography, prices, images from the pages,
more or less shopping, and even thumbnails of the
pages. This has really improved my searches when
I’m looking for something a little harder to find.
We have made our snippets “richer” in all sorts of
ways. We also improved personalized search, helping
you get results more tailored to you, and have done
a lot of work on getting real-time results to you
in seconds. A lot of our focus goes towards
improving core relevance—making sure you get
exactly what you want when you type a query.
Typically we are running hundreds of experiments at
a time to improve relevance. And we made additional
improvements around comprehensiveness, making sure
we search everything in the world.

Search ads are our main source of revenue and of
course an important focus. We view our search ads
as information for users, just like search results.
With Universal Search, we now provide results in
many different formats, such as videos, maps and
news, and we needed to do the same for
advertisements. For example, you can now see
product ads with prices and pictures of the items,
similar to the shopping search results you can get
in organic search. It is interesting to note these
retail ads can be cost-per-acquisition, which means
the advertiser pays only if someone buys something.
This is wonderful for the advertiser, who doesn’t
have to take any risk at all. Advertisers can
easily put in all their inventory without worry,
rather than just a subset of the most important
items. We also get to build great new prediction
systems that do the hard work of estimating what
bid yields the best results for advertisers, based
on the cost-per-acquisition goal they set. There
are new ad formats specifically for local
businesses, comparison ads for financial products,
and sitelinks for navigational queries. I’m really
excited about the benefits new ad formats can have
both for our advertisers and our users. We also
have done some significant work to reduce what we
call “scammy” advertising to make ads safer and
more relevant for users. In addition, we made many
improvements to our core advertising systems behind
the scenes. There is a lot of technology used to
make the advertising work and estimate
clickthroughs of ads and so on. Improvements to
these systems have very measurable and meaningful
effects on advertiser and user happiness.

On display ads, we have really benefited from a
successful integration with DoubleClick. We
launched new analytics and media planning in DART
for Advertisers (DFA), and have made big strides in
the Google Content Network—the extensive collection
of partner sites on which we run ads from our
network. In 2009, we sold display advertising on
that network, which includes YouTube, to 94 of the
Ad Age top 100 advertisers. I’m also very excited
about interest-based advertising, which helps
deliver ads tailored to people’s interests. Users
can adjust their preferences to generate more
relevant ads, or opt out altogether (which very few
people choose to do). A tool called Display Ad
Builder helps you build display ads in seconds so
that even the smallest advertisers can use display.
Through our acquisition of Teracent you can
automatically create thousands of potential
permutations of display ads and automatically
optimize each ad that is displayed. The DoubleClick
Ad Exchange helps make the display industry more
open, transparent, fair, and effective for everyone
from ad networks to agency holding companies to
large publishers. Over 50 U.S. ad networks have
already signed up for the new Ad Exchange. There
are a ton of improvements we are focused on making
in all of these areas, and I am excited about our
very substantial progress to date.

Google Analytics

Sergey and I like to use as many of our products as
possible, and we have both signed up for AdWords so
we can get closer to the real experience customers
face every day. Whenever we spend money on
advertising, we like to know if we are actually
getting our money’s worth. Turns out other people
want to know as well! Google Analytics lets you
measure in great detail the return on your
investment, and everything else going on in your
website too. You can directly and automatically use
this information to improve your advertising.
Getting many more advertising customers to take
advantage of this system is a priority. The data
Analytics provides, and the analysis it makes
possible, is quite a contrast to traditional
advertising where it can be very hard to know
exactly how well any particular ad worked. This is
because the Internet enables much more measurement,
and we are trying to accelerate that trend.

Geo

Unfortunately no one I know has figured out how to
be in multiple places at the same time, so location
is important to everyone. As I mentioned earlier,
I’m amazed at the geographic products our teams
have built. You can get a pretty accurate 3D view
of nearly anywhere in the world. Amazing. In the
last year we have released our own comprehensive
source maps of streets and addresses for Mexico and
the U.S.—and users have been working on building
and correcting over 60 countries. Street View has
exploded around the world with more than twice the
countries covered and has unbelievable, higher
resolution images in many places. Our Street View
images of Whistler at the Olympics had nearly as
many views as there are Canadians! We also made
many improvements to how we handle local
businesses.

I love that you can now search for something in
Google Maps and then see all the little dots on the
map, no matter how many there are, or how much you
move the map around. With all the progress we’ve
made with geo products, I can now be found in my
one-time location of Happy, Texas!

On a much more serious and sad note, after the
tragic earthquakes in Haiti and Chile we were able
to gather updated high resolution imagery very
quickly to help the relief efforts in both
countries. In Google Earth, you can view images of
places over time by enabling “historical imagery”.
I did this for Haiti and found it brought home the
devastation of the earthquake because I would see
exactly which buildings had been damaged. It was
almost as if I was there.

Google Books

I was amazed to see on Google Books a fully
accessible archive of some priceless magazines,
including Popular Science—going back 137 years! It
has all the ads and everything, though they didn’t
seem to have many ads back in the April 1872
edition. It is truly a dream fulfilled for me that
we now have 12 million books scanned and available
for searching at books.google.com. That is
already bigger than almost any university library,
and we’re not done yet. We negotiated a settlement
agreement with publishers and authors to sell the
full text of many of these books, so they can earn
money from their work, much of which is out of
print. It’s currently awaiting court approval, in
the wake of much controversy and much support.

At the basic level, there is tremendous knowledge
available in books and libraries that hasn’t made
it onto the Internet. We now have relationships
with over 30,000 publishers—an enormous number of
partners. Together, we’re working toward a system
where everyone has increased access to these
valuable texts. I am very excited about the
possibilities to help expand human knowledge,
create new revenue streams for content creators,
and improve the quality of search for every Google
user.

A New Kind of Computing

Google Chrome, Google Chrome OS, and Android are
all very exciting to me. What we are aiming to do
is to redefine the nature of commercial computing
by making it modern, simple, and open source.
Sergey and I (and Google) grew up with Linux and we
have all benefited greatly from that open model. We
believe that it is a great way to run a healthy and
vibrant high tech ecosystem. In fact it is how the
Internet came to be.

All of these products are open source because we
believe that is the best way to improve the
ecosystem. An open model not only inspires
innovation among developers, but also helps
generally improve the quality of the software
through peer review and public scrutiny of the
code. And both are good for users. Google has
released over 12 million lines of code across over
350 open source projects, and we host over 220,000
open source projects on the Google Code site. We
have had tremendous response from the developer
community with more and more developers
participating in our ecosystem— an important
business goal for us./

Google Chrome

I think Google Chrome is a beautiful, fast, and
simple browser. I just read a review where it
handily beat all others in speed and won the
overall award. It is an amazing product, and usage
is growing quickly, with over 40 million active
users despite the fact that the product is just
eighteen months old. We have worked hard to improve
the security model so you can browse with less
worry of your computer being compromised. We have
all sorts of technological magic to make the web
into a much more robust platform, so you can run
powerful software as easy as viewing a web page.
Chrome is so small and fast to install you can get
it on your computer faster than you can make your
morning coffee. Make your life better and install
it now at google.com/chrome.

I love Chrome!

Google Chrome OS

One day several years ago in one of our meetings
everyone had a laptop out and was working (this is
unfortunately typical behavior, and I feel
partially responsible because I demanded power for
laptops in all our conference tables). By doing a
survey of the room I noticed that only a few people
were running anything besides a web browser on
their laptop. This seemed rather surprising as you
have this big complex OS but it was only running
one program, the browser. We decided it would be a
good idea to rethink what you are running on your
computer from the inside out. If we spend our lives
in the browser, and the cloud, why not have the
whole computer organized around that? It turns out
if you think this way, you can really change a lot
about computers. They get simpler, easier, and
faster. Google Chrome OS boots from a cold machine
in seconds you can count on one hand. This is great
and is about the same time it takes most laptops to
wake from a suspend (a much more complicated
battery-consuming and error-prone process). I
should note that Chrome OS is not out yet, and in
mentioning it we have violated our own policy of
not talking about things before we launch. We knew
we wanted to develop Chrome OS in concert with the
open source community and of course that had to be
in the open. Therefore we had to pre-announce
Chrome OS. One reason we don’t like to pre-announce
is that we don’t like to pretend we know how long
things take to become great products. So we don’t
really know exactly when you’ll get a super-shiny
polished Chrome OS netbook in your hands. I’m still
planning on being young when it happens.

Android

It is amazing to me that everyone doesn’t yet have
a smartphone running Android. Doesn’t everyone want
an open, Internet-enabled computer in their pocket
that is as good as a laptop from a couple of years
ago? The reality is that the costs are still a bit
high for everyone to switch today, especially with
carrier costs and contracts, but that is changing
really quickly. My Google Nexus One phone has no
trouble playing music through Bluetooth over my car
stereo, interrupting to read street names and
display a map from Google Maps. I should note that
driving directions that prompt you, just like a
real navigation system, are free on the new Android
phones. Get your car dock ready and you will have
an amazing experience with updated traffic and even
a photo from Street View of your destination. I
can’t even count all the partners we have in our
Open Handset Alliance (sounds like Star Wars,
doesn’t it?)—turns out there are now 65. We have
over 20,000 applications in our market, my favorite
is an app called FaceIt that displays a Dracula
face you can put in front of your mouth that moves
when you talk. Android is another product only in
its baby stage, and yet we have already seen
significant uptake. These types of projects take a
lot of foresight to develop. We acquired Android in
2005, so it spent quite a while in gestation before
launching. We also have over 60 carriers in 49
countries and 19 languages. Android has changed my
life and I can’t wait for what it does next.

Summary

Our employees, or Googlers, as we call ourselves,
now number about 20,000. This seems like a big
number. But given the importance of the web, we
think there are not yet enough people working in
earnest on the many exciting opportunities in
technology. Our challenge as we expand is to keep
everyone organized and motivated. This keeps
Sergey, Eric, and me quite busy, and I’m sure it
will keep us and the rest of the team engaged for a
long time to come.

Google has grown very quickly in the last eleven
years. While we’ve undoubtedly had a lot of good
luck, we have also worked really hard on search and
advertising for more than a decade. That focus has
paid off, both for our users and our business.
Google is now a much larger company, and with size
comes scrutiny and a certain amount of skepticism.
We get that. But we also know that while new
technology is often disruptive, it can help solve
many of the problems we face in the world. We’re
excited about the possibilities before us at Google
and plan to work hard to make those possibilities
real.